Founded in 1989, Dedalus is a Brazilian-based company that is 100 percent dedicated to cloud computing. As a leader in the Brazilian IT market, Dedalus helps Enterprise companies make the successful journey to the cloud, and works with hundreds of customers across industries to provide managed cloud services. Dedalus has had a relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) since 2010, and has been an AWS Channel Reseller since 2011 and AWS Partner Network (APN) Premier Partner since 2012.

As a systems integrator and hosting provider, Dedalus became a leader in the Brazilian market and an expert in managed services. In 1999, after a decade as a successful systems integrator, Dedalus established the first Internet data center in Brazil, which eventually scaled to over 2000 physical servers. While successful, President Mauricio Fernandes explained that the company hit a point where it had explored the former model of IT to its limits. According to Fernandes, the company realized that with the evolution of technology came the need for Dedalus to expand, automate, and approach IT in a new way. “We were no longer the Brazilian company that helped customers use advanced technology to better their business, because we represented old, traditional technologies. We had to terminate the old cycle of IT processes, and devote all of the energy of the company to cloud computing,” says Fernandes. Additionally, owning and managing its own data center had become difficult and complex. The company decided to take its expertise in application migration and management, sell its data center, and become re-born as a company on AWS.

Dedalus considered two options after the company decided to make the move to the cloud: to either build on AWS, or to build its own cloud. Dedalus decided to move forward with AWS for a number of reasons. To begin, the company felt it would be advantageous in the Brazilian market. Fernandes explains that AWS branding is very important to Dedalus, as it translates to reliability, innovation, and cost-savings for customers: “We don’t have to explain who AWS is, or why we’d chose to work with AWS,” says Fernandes. From a technological standpoint, the AWS rapid pace of innovation enables Dedalus to stay at the forefront of cloud computing technology. Finally, Dedalus respects AWS long-term objectives. “As a mature company, Dedalus seeks mature partners. We admire not only the history of AWS, but also its long-term commitment and goals,” says Fernandes.

Dedalus has been able to create a new business model on top of AWS that is more fluid, scalable, agile, and innovative than its previous models. The fact that AWS is a language and operating system agnostic platform is crucial for Dedalus, as the company works across a wide range of technologies such as Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, IBM WebSphere, DB2, MySQL, SQL, and Linux. As an APN Partner, Dedalus is able to focus on their own services and solutions, and on helping customers migrate to the AWS platform and better understand how to utilize AWS products and services to improve its own business. Fernandes says he is encountering more and more customers who want to go all-in on the cloud, and working with AWS provides Dedalus with the building blocks the company needs to handle a diverse scope of workloads and projects, from traditional workloads to mission-critical applications.

With hundreds of customers running a diverse scope of workloads on AWS (including SAP, ERPs, CRMs, proprietary applications, e-commerce, and e-learning workloads), the company primarily uses AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB), and Amazon CloudWatch, and has been pleased with the flexibility of the AWS platform. “With more than 4000 CPUs, we use nearly all models and families of Amazon EC2, and use them on-demand, spot, and in reserved instances as appropriate,” Fernandes explains. As a managed services provider working with a large number of applications across environments, Dedalus employs Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the different environments the company manages, and find that it helps to manage its resources more efficiently. Through tools such as Amazon CloudWatch, Dedalus is able to better monitor and understand the applications it's in charge of managing, which in turn allows the company to provide greater value to its end customers.

According to Fernandes, “Our experience with AWS exceeded our expectations. We were looking for a platform for IaaS. What we found was a new world of opportunities and innovation.” Today, AWS represents over 60 percent of Dedalus’s revenue. According to Fernandes, Dedalus has doubled its revenue with AWS every year since 2011, and has doubled the number of active customers on the AWS platform in the past 12 months. For Dedalus’s end customers, the shift to AWS has helped lower their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) as compared to previous solutions. Fernandes estimates that customers reduce their overall TCO by approximately 20 percent if they migrate their architecture as-is to the AWS platform, and around 60 – 70 percent if they are willing to transform their architecture to take advantage of advanced AWS technologies.

Fernandes believes that the biggest motivation for most Dedalus customers to move to the cloud is agility. Through AWS, Dedalus has experienced great success in both the time-to-market and scaling capabilities for end customers. For instance, the deployment of new customers on the AWS platform takes less than 1/3 the time it took when Dedalus ran its own data center. Workloads can be developed from scratch to a production state in hours, even minutes if necessary. If a new environment needs to be changed, it’s no longer a complicated and painful process for end customers, or for internal Dedalus project development.

Another benefit to being an APN Partner and being built on AWS is the impact on Dedalus’s employees and its ability to recruit talent. The team is able to handle the same workload it experienced at its own data center, but with half the manpower. This has, according to Fernandes, provided his staff with the opportunity for personal and professional growth. Dedalus staff have learned key skills through working with AWS that have provided them with the ability to transition from operational work to database and application development, and managerial responsibilities. Fernandes mentions the experience of one employee in particular who had operational experience working with SQL in the previous data center environment. With the transition to the AWS cloud, the opportunity arose for this employee to gain new skillsets and experience professional growth during Dedalus’ adoption and implementation of Amazon DynamoDB. While some of his staff was initially nervous about the transition to the cloud and how it may impact their work, they’ve learned that it is “a new and a better reality,” explains Fernandes.

Fernandes says that Dedalus plans to continue to help customers build better businesses through products that can become part of its managed services offerings. He says to expect Dedalus to add many more managed services offerings based on the AWS platform in 2015 and beyond.

For more information about Dedalus, please see the company's listing in the AWS Partner Directory.